


Laudanum Dreams

by tangofox



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Death, Graphic Descriptions of Death and Decomposition, Jehan is a beautiful bird, Lots of Death talk, Mentions/Hints of Jehan/Grantaire, Overdose, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-05
Updated: 2013-07-05
Packaged: 2017-12-17 18:46:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/870809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tangofox/pseuds/tangofox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They say that in that fleeting moment before death, your whole life should flash before your eyes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Laudanum Dreams

Jehan liked to draw death. Rotting flowers and expiring animals, gruesome murders and tragic battles. He liked to capture that moment, just before death, just on the brink. That to him, must be when the world seems the most beautiful. He had heard some say that in that fleeting moment, your whole life should flash before your eyes. And oh, how intense it must feel, he thinks, to experience all the sorrow, and all of the joy you had ever felt. To remember every sun and every moon, to think of every love lost, and every love conquered. How bright the world must seem as it is on the edge of ending, and how horrific, the sudden realisation that you are not immortal, as you once might have thought. 

He remembers a fox that had wriggled it's way into his garden, caught itself on the wire fence, and chosen a patch of his soil, to lay down on and die. How sweet his roses and peonies must have smelt to the dying creature, how poetic for it to die amongst such beauty. He wondered how people could bear to go on living without poetry, or literature, or art. Surely ones soul must wither and die without such indulgences. Perhaps he was seeing the world all wrong. Perhaps he was passing walking, talking corpses, rotting all over the streets of Paris. Maybe the stench of the city wasn't to be blamed on the polluted river at all; it must come from the soulless.   
He had intended to sketch the fox, pay his respects to Gods scavenging creature by recording it's death scene. He was sure others would find his notion much more macabre than respectful. The fox had male organs. He tried to find some poetic meaning in that; in the death of the male animal, who died no doubt greedily searching for food in his garden, when surely there was more to be eaten in the woodland, in his home. But seemingly the foxes territory wasn't enough, and he had to invade Jehan's urban garden, tainting it, leaving a stain of blood and death in his safe place.   
The fox reminded him of an old boyfriend, and more than once, he mused about naming it. He had sketched the corpse of the animal, and later had showed it to Combeferre, who had kindly tutored him on how to draw the animals anatomy more accurately. He listed and he learned, but accuracey was never his concern. He just wanted to capture the emotion, the feeling he had when he saw it. 

When he returned the next time the fox had swollen, and he could no longer describe it as just a dead animal, it was just a rotting, bloated hunk of flesh. How quickly change happens. He wonders how many creatures had burrowed inside of it, so desperate for a home that they would choose the fox in his garden. If this creature once had a soul, it had left in Jehan's absense. A bird had visited, and one of the eyes had been pecked out. Jehan sat for hours, staring into the black, soulless pit, losing himself. He wept. He imagined there was a vixen and a handful of kits huddled up in a den, not knowing if he would ever return. Perhaps, like the people of Paris, they would vainly wait in hope for someone to feed their empty mouths. He wonders if foxes are capable of love, or if when they mate, they don't connect like humans do.

Jehan had once struck a man who had scoffed openly at the thought of love at first sight. Jehan felt as if he fell in love at least twelve times a day. He remembers his first love. A girl with raven black hair and soft dark skin. They had held hands and picked flowers in a field. Just once, Jehan had kissed her on the cheek, and had blushed enough for the both of them. The unconstrained innocence of his first love would always stay with him. He never remembers her name though, just ebony locks and soft brown skin. It was like that with a lot of his lovers, he just remembered details; the way they sang, the sound of their laughter, the colour of their hair. In contemplation perhaps he was more in love with her exotic beauty, the way her hair had looked in the sunlight.  
His second love had been much more complex. The boy – and that was only the beginning of the complexity – was a school friend. Uglier than the corpse of the rotting fox, as cynical as an old man who had seen too much and lived too long. But Jehan had loved him anyway, had found an abundance of things about him to love. The way his brow furrowed in concentration when he boxed, how his hands looked when he painted. He loved him still, even as the years had passed, and they had not passed by kindly. 

He had Grantaire help him move the carcass to the woods, he would remember it as a point about how strong their friendship was, and how great a man Grantaire was, that he came with no objections to letting Jehan wrap a dead fox in tarpaulin, put it in the boot of his car, and help Jehan put it in a woodland clearing. He asked Jehan if he needed to bring a shovel to bury it, but that confused Jehan. It wasn't a human, it didn't need a burial. Nature should take care of it. Part of him wanted to leave it in the garden, but the maggots would ruin his flowers. And that would ruin him.

Some days he thought he should be locked up in bedlam. He was volatile, melancholic, everything was too much, and too little at once. The world seemed to hold him on a silver platter only to burn. He knew other people must understand, must feel like this too. Surely the writers and the poets he adored so dearly must understand how he feels. He went back the next day, and watched nature devour the fox, while reading Keats. 

Jehan wasn't quietly musing on these memories. He was seeing them all in flashes before his eyes, exhilarating, an explosion of emotions as he sank further into the bathtub, the murky pink water now coming up to his chin. Even with the bottle of Laudanum empty, rolled off somewhere along the bathroom floor, even with aching wrists and unsteady hearts, he could smile. How poetic, that he would see Grantaire's face, not knowing if it was real or just another memory, smiling at him genuinely for once, that crooked nose and those crinkled eyes burned behind his eyelids as he closes them for the last time.


End file.
